Can a 72,000 Cow CAFO Be Sustainable?

[Update: For a response from the company, go to the bottom of the post.]

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations are not the poster child for sustainable agriculture. They've been cited for everything from animal welfare abuse issues to gross environmental violations. Housing tens of thousands of animals in confinement in a system that creates massive waste and is propped up only by the  use of food subsidies, cheap fuel, massive amounts of pharmaceuticals and the externalization of environmental costs, is not the ideal model of raising animals.

So what to make of a new proposal for a 72,000-cow CAFO in New York State — a facility that would be the largest CAFO east of the Mississippi — which is calling itself 'sustainable'?

This is precisely what Ulla Kjarval wondered in a recent blog post on Civil Eats. Her family operates a grass-fed beef and lamb farm in upstate New York.

As for the sustainability question, here’s how the CAFO is supposed to work. Kjarval writes that it is designed to function as a closed-loop ethanol plant, with corn being shipped across Lake Ontario and into Oswego. Corn will be turned into ethanol at a plant and the waste will be fed to cattle. The cattle’s manure will in turn help generate energy for the ethanol plant.

Even with a closed-loop system, ethanol still has some serious environmental problems, especially when it comes to water use and pesticides. So the ‘sustainable’ imprimatur on this plant, in my opinion, is questionable at best. And of course figuring out what to do with cow poop is only one part of the many problems that plague CAFOs.

But as Kjarval points out, many people in the community are split on the issue and it really brings up much larger questions about “what real food means to us” and how that affects rural communities. This isn’t simply a matter of big farmers versus small farmers, but a system of government that favors corn and ethanol, she adds.

Anyone want to take a red pen to the Farm Bill?

UPDATE: I received a response from Jeff Kappell, Bion's VP for Project Development and Renewables. I'm including excerpts from that response below. The project also has a website.

Numerous studies have identified a litany of issues across the broad spectrum of "animal welfare abuse to gross environmental violations." One such report, by the Pew Charitable Trust ["Industrial Farm Animal Production" ] documents concerns for unintended risks from large-scale animal production across four broad areas: public health, the environment, animal welfare and the quality of rural life. Their response however is not to call for the elimination of CAFO's — in part because of the resulting impact to the cost of consumer food products and in part because of the economic reliance of rural communities on viable agricultural operations.

The Pew report identified ammonia as a significant contributor to many of the environmental and public health issues related to livestock waste. Bion's ability to reduce air emissions from livestock manure, including ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, VOC's and greenhouse gases, directly addresses public health and animal welfare issues. It is worth noting that the Bion System’s animal housing and multiple daily collections of manure for treatment eliminates the need for non-therapeutic use of antimicrobials by dramatically reducing vector transport pressures.

In addition to the attributes of waste management and animal welfare, Bion's technology platform extracts and processes the cellulose / fiber portion of the livestock manure stream to produce renewable energy.

Certainly everyone will agree that a rigorous environmental component is a requirement [for sustainable agriculture] . At the same time, every farmer, producer or grower in the nation would correctly insist that true sustainability requires economic viability while accomplishing the required environmental goals. It is this very imperative (economic viability in concert with environmental sustainability) that requires scale -- anathema to some -- that is needed to achieve operational efficiencies to cover the cost of state of the art waste treatment technologies and livestock housing such as Bion will utilize.

A recent paper entitled "Demystifying the Environmental Sustainability of Food Production," scientists from Washington State and Cornell Universities point out that "it is essential to use a standardized assessment tool" when measuring environmental impact, one that reflects impact per functional unit of food, i.e. units of environmental impact per pound of meat or gallon of milk ... [B]y their measure, a dairy cow producing 40 pounds of milk per day for example will result in greater environmental impacts than one producing 80 pounds per day, assuming that their inputs are not doubled.

"‘Grass-fed’ or ‘grass-finished’ beef is [also] often touted as a more environmentally-friendly option for the consumer than conventional (corn-finished) beef. [But] the authors of the paper conclude: "The increases in resource use per unit of output associated with 'traditional' dairy and beef production systems demonstrate that the popular perception of low-input sustainable systems does not align with true sustainability when trying to meet a static or increasing demand for food."

Food products generated from a Bion installation will benefit from a dramatically reduced environmental footprint as compared to existing operations of any size on a per head (or per unit of food) basis.

Photo credit: blmurch via flickr